A further stage in the campaign against consumption is marked
by the memorial presented to the Metropolitan Asylums Board by Sir William Broadbent and published in the Times of Friday, the 2nd inst. Sir William Broadbent recommends first that the Board should constitute itself the tuberculosis authority for the Metropolis, and so acquire power to place some check on the ravages of a disease which costs the country "tens of thousands of lives and millions of money every year." It would thus be in a position to devote one or more of the existing hospitals to the reception and isolation of consumptive patients, to insist on notification by Poor Law medical officers, and, by means of domiciliary visits of sanitary inspectors and philanthropic workers, to educate patients and their families in the methods of minimising the danger. The Times, in an instructive leader on the subject, calls attention to the fact, vouched for by Sir Edmund Hay Currie, hon. secretary to the Hospital Sunday Fund, that the hospital accommodation for London consumptives is not nearly adequate to the demand, urges on local authorities. the need of rigorously enforcing by-laws against spitting in public, and insists that what is most needed is to bring proper restraint to bear on the ignorant man at home.
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